Bruins happy to see Patrice Bergeron getting credit he deserves

When Patrice Bergeron won the Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward last season, many folks it was overdue. He’d been considered one of the more underrated players in the game for quite some time, but his national exposure during the 2011 playoffs got people’s attention, and the next year he got his first Selke nomination and victory.

More so than other awards, the Selke fraternity is a kind of member-for-life type of club. Once you’ve won it, you’ll be considered every year as long as you’re healthy.Pavel Datsyuk, a three-time winner and a finalist again this season, is proof of that. Now that Bergeron is a member of the club, the Bruins are pleased to see he’s finally getting the recognition from the national media (the trophy is voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association).

“I can tell you right now, I would be extremely disappointed and would’ve been vocal about it had he not been [a finalist],” Claude Julien said. “This guy here is so good at both ends of the ice, and he keeps proving it year after year. There’s not too many guys in this league that can do what Patrice does. You saw him, as you mentioned, scoring those goals the other night. But you also see him every year, we talk about Zdeno [Chara] playing against top players on other teams, so does he for the most part. At the end of every year he’s always a plus player, so that tells you a lot about the utility and how valuable this guy is to our team.”

Bergeron led the NHL with a 62.1 success rate on faceoffs (549-for-884) and finished sixth in the league with a plus-24 rating during the regular season. The other two finalists for the award are Datsyuk and Blackhawks center Jonathan Toews are the other finalists for the award.